Friday, April 02, 2010

Thursday in the Park with Moi

Everybody was out catching sunshine today in the afternoon in Washington Square Park, a place where the crazy, loony, eccentric, bohemian, neurotic, rich, poor and middle class villagers still converge, the Universe bless this park.
You can sit for three hours on a bench and just watch shit unfold in front of your eyes. It never gets boring. I saw a burly Black guy happily give a foot massage to his girlfriend, who lay prostrate and with the sense of entitlement of the Queen of Sheba. Good for them.
I saw a chorus of extremely white kids that looked way too wholesome for New York and who were clearly influenced by Glee. Their shtick was to sing unsingable pop songs a cappella, such as Beyonce's Crazy In Love, a song I hate even with full orchestration. Their wholesomeness was very disturbing, but I'm not sure that they were Christian evangelists, as I always suspect of people who are too wholesome, too happy and too white.
I made friends with Henriette, a totally lucid and charming 100 year old Belgian woman, who will be 101 in July and who recently had a stroke and was a bit frustrated she couldn't walk anymore. She didn't look a day over 90, wheelchair notwithstanding. Usually I don't speak to anyone, because I am a New York crank of the sullen variety,  but she complimented me on my green sneakers and we struck up a conversation. She was lovely.
It looks like the fashion among the young is an exhumation of the worst of Eighties style, sans shoulder pads. Apparently it is the height of chic to walk around with shredded pantyhose, ugly booties and uglier skorts, looking pasty and wearing hideous colors and shoes the color of dogshit.
As is usual, the eternal hippies with their jam sessions were in attendance.


This dude slept so profoundly and in such an uncomfortable position, that for a moment I thought he was dead. A homeless-looking Black guy, one of those pesky nutcases who love to engage with people, seemingly unaware (or perhaps much too aware) that his sociability is totally unrequited, looked at him sleeping and poked him hard in the chest a couple of times, yet the dude didn't budge. When he finally woke up, it took him like 20 minutes to discern he was on Earth, then he smoked a cigarette and fell asleep again. I wonder if he is a junkie, a narcoleptic or a very exhausted man.
The same Black crazy guy then decided to participate with the Wholesome Wonder Bread Choir. He didn't sing; he imitated their dance movements with absolute precision and in total synch with them. It was hilarious. They paid him no mind, which gives them New York brownie points for a good display of indifference. Perhaps not so wholesome after all.
Speaking of dance, there was a really obnoxious troupe of what I assume are modern dance students from Tisch, showing off their tacky moves and wanting to be far more interesting than they were. They really annoyed me, with their studied pretense of unselfconsciousness and their jerky, ungraceful movements. In this park it's hard to say the next sentence about anyone, but these people were embarrassing.
What else did I see? Three neurotic Schnaussers barking like madmen at any dog that went by.  A guy who also looked homeless sat next to me and started fishing out something from his pocket. It crossed my mind that he might be engaging in some happy time with his dick, to judge from the urgent way he burrowed in there. But it turns out that once he found this little stub of a pencil, he started drawing in a pad, copying from nature, and pretty well. He gave a gummi bear to one of the schnaussers, who almost choked while trying to eat it, but came back for seconds anyway.

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